Texturing large terrain

Hi,

I’m working on a desert terrain for a particular object, but I’m having problems texturing it. The problem is, this object is very large. If I assign a texture to it, it will look very ugly, because the part that is visible up close, only takes up a small percentage of the entire image. Even when using procedurals, setting size to x=100, y=100, z=100, it’s not detailed enough. An image would need to be 50000x50000 to give any kind of acceptable result, which is unworkable, of course.

So, my rather generic question is: how does one texture large landscapes, in this case a desert, which still looks good when rendered up close? I’d like to take a picture of cinnamon or cacao, because that looks very desert like, but when the texture is applied, it will just look like 100 blurred pixels…

I tried making a relatively small object for the close-up terrain, and use a separate background image which I composited in, but there is no sense of depth when I do that, and it’s very visible it’s one image over the other.

Tile a repeating texture or have a low rez cover the whole dessert and a high rez where the camera will be. Also you could try procedural textures.

as a base http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Vertex_Paint

Tile a repeating texture or have a low rez cover the whole dessert and a high rez where the camera will be.

I’ve never been good at making an image tileable, but that may be the best option. Maximum repeat is 512 for an image, which should be enough.

as a base http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Vertex_Paint

I don’t think I will be able to achieve good results with vertex painting. I couldn’t get enough detail out of it.